Salesforce Classic to Lightning Migration

July 9, 2026
Sohaib Zaidi

Migration is a daunting task often costing millions of dollars. It can take months (if not years) to complete. With this amount of effort and time Salesforce Classic users undeniably ask if migrating to Salesforce Lightning worth-it?

Salesforce Lightning, introduced in 2014, faced initial resistance from Classic users. As of 2021, over 90% of Salesforce customers use Lightning. Despite its benefits, migration can cost between $100K to $1M, depending on instance complexity.

Why do businesses carry out a Classic to Lightning migration? What are the best practices for migration? How test automation can ensure on time, and under budget migration.

Why Migrate From Salesforce Classic To Lightning?

Salesforce Classic is a legacy development platform with limited functionality.

Lightning is Salesforce’s latest platform that allows non-technical users to customize apps.

Lightning offers better user experience, with easy-to-use features like drag-and-drop. In terms of actionable insights and visibility, Lightning empowers users with Einstein (Wave) Analytics reporting. Einstein is an industry-leading tool for sales and marketing forecasting.

Lightning offers an intuitive, sleek, and powerful UI that enables a swift transition between desktop and mobile devices.

Classic platform does not easily receive any new developments or features.

Lightning users will have access to the three seasonal Salesforce releases. These bring hundreds of new features and enhancements each year. Users on Classic will have to pay additional fees for updates and new services.

Salesforce Classic to Lightning Migration Challenges

While there are many reasons to migrate from Classic to Lightning, the migration isn’t easy. For many organizations, migrating to Lightning can be a painstaking process.

Challenges include the need for thorough planning and testing, potential customization issues, and user training and adoption. With proper preparation and execution, the benefits of Lightning, such as improved productivity and user experience, can outweigh the challenges of migration.

Robust, test focused migration strategy, can ensure smooth and seamless migration to Lightning.

Best Practices For Salesforce Classic To Lightning Migration

How to quickly and efficiently migrate from Classic to Lightning in Salesforce. These best practices can surely help you.

Step 1: Lightning Readiness Check

Evaluate Salesforce org thoroughly to understand how your organization currently uses Salesforce Classic. This helps understand the impact of a Lightning migration on users’ critical workflows. Existing features in Classic will not be available in Lightning and need to be replaced with new ones, there’s a possibility of process deviations. Readiness checks pick up unforeseen bugs or org incompatibilities. Further, readiness checks:

• uncover potential code issues, including direct and indirect code dependencies.
• provide visibility into the most at risk components during a migration.
• discover features that users are currently using in the Classic version, but won’t be able to in Lightning.
• figure out disruptions to your critical integrations and APIs.

Step 2: Perform The Migration To Sandbox

To migrate your org, you need to move it to a sandbox, which is a test environment provided by Salesforce. This allows you to safely test and experiment with new configurations, apps, or changes to your setup without any risks.

By using a sandbox, you can test new functionality. Receive feedback before an official launch. This helps identify and fix bugs early on, ensuring a smoother launch. Key stakeholders and super users can easily test and provide feedback in the sandbox environment. It leads to a more successful implementation.

Step 3: Test Your Migration In Sandbox

Testing Salesforce Lightning in the sandbox is arguably the most crucial step in the migration. It ensures that apps, features, customizations, and integrations work as intended. Testing should also cover features that were not covered during Lightning Experience Readiness Check.

Some of the features in Classic need to be replaced with the ones in Lightning. Testing needs to be done to understand each process deviation. Exhaustive user acceptance testing and functional testing needs to be performed to understand the impact of each change, and decide the necessary workarounds.

Step 4: Roll Out Lightning To End Users

Once testing is done, you can roll out Lightning to individual departments.

Step 5: Perform Post Migration Integrity Checks

Allocate Lightning to specific groups of users so as to refine the UI based on their feedback. Continue to repeat the tests for different user groups, and identify common pain points.

Step 6: Testing Post-Migration

One of the biggest advantages of a Classic to Lightning migration is the access to hundreds of new features in the form of seasonal releases. Salesforce seasonal releases must be thoroughly tested. With every new customization and integration that’s introduced to your Salesforce org, testing must be performed. This ensures your system is functioning as intended.

Testing Is Integral To SFDC

Testing is an integral part of the Salesforce development lifecycle (SFDC), and we explained why relying on manual Salesforce testing isn’t a viable option. To speed up the migration process and ensure the migration doesn’t go over-budget, you need Salesforce test automation.

Automating Salesforce Testing Is A Challenge

While choosing an automated Salesforce testing platform, understand that business users are the key stakeholders in Salesforce Lightning migration success. They’re the ones who typically execute UAT and functional testing. They’re the ones usually responsible for seasonal update testing.

These users are usually non-technical, you must use a no-code test automation platform with a low learning curve.

We believe Opkey is the industry’s most advanced no-code Salesforce test automation platform. How? Let’s find out.

No-code automation: Opkey comes with a Salesforce-specific record and playback engine. It allows business users to intuitively create test cases on the fly. Opkey can be operated without any technical knowledge. It can easily handle Salesforce’s dynamic objects and controls, since it communicates directly with Salesforce APIs.

Self-configuring test scripts: Opkey comes packed with built-in AI. It directly consumes meta-data to autonomously detect existing configurations. This reduces initial test automation setup time by up to 70%.

Self-healing test scripts: Opkey is a meta-data driven platform. Whenever there are changes to test scripts due to a change in an object property, it automatically identifies those changes. Fixes them without human intervention. This greatly alleviates the burden of test maintenance.

End-to-end testing: Opkey offers support for dozens of applications in the Salesforce app exchange, including Copado, Gearset, and others, along with web, mobile, APIs, Desktop, Citrix, Mainframes, and other legacy applications. You can seamlessly use Opkey for end-to-end testing across Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, CPQ, and other platforms. This ensures that when your Salesforce org updates, no integrations break.

‍Seamless test management: Opkey natively integrates with test management tools like Jira, Jenkins, Bamboo, ALM, and more. This ensures Salesforce releases are complete in a time-efficient manner.